Libi b'Azza (My Heart Is In Gaza)
Valentine's Day, Coffee Culture & Sasha Trufanov
I’m currently in Orlando, but I’m fairly positive that my experience today could be mimicked across all the cities of North America: I am surrounded by the paraphernalia of Valentines Day, from pink heart-shaped stickers to overly-expensive Valentines Day menus. The constant messaging that the truest expression of love requires the financial resources to buy $100 roses. But all I can think about is the loved ones of the three men who are supposed to be returned tomorrow, and how the truest expression of real love is how hard they have fought to have their loved ones home: travelling the world, speaking at the UN, shutting down highways in Tel Aviv, screaming their children’s names at the border. The last week has been one of emotional highs-and-lows, from the appalling state of health of last week’s hostages to Hamas’ announcement that they were pausing the hostage deal, from Trump’s promise that all hell would break loose were the hostages not all released by Saturday, to Hamas’ commitment to follow-through on the deal as originally devised. Tomorrow three men are expected to be released: Sasha Trufanov (29), Sagui Dekel-Chen (36) and Iair Horn (46). Dekel-Chen will meet his daughter for the first time, and Horn leaves a brother still captive in Gaza, but today I want to focus on Sasha.
Alexander “Sasha” Trufanov is a Russian-Israeli who was taken hostage from Nir Oz on October 7th, along with his girlfriend and mom — both of whom were released in the first hostage deal in November of 2023. We had the privilege of meeting his girlfriend Sapir at TanenbaumCHAT, the school in Toronto that I work at. She came on a speaking tour in North America about her experiences in the days before, and weeks after, that fateful Simchat Torah. Sapir and Sasha live in Ramat Gan, and had agreed to visit his parents in the Otef that weekend; Sasha didn’t want to go. Sapir convinced him that, among other reasons why he had to, his parents were counting on him to go. So off they went before Shabbat, and they were kidnapped from the safe room the following morning. His father did not survive.
The Trufanov family is one of those Russian-Israeli families that don’t have a lot of “people” - most of their family still lives in Russia. Sasha was born in Rostov. That morning, there were a few messages from the immediate family to others, saying that they were in the mamad, followed by silence. When Nir Oz was retaken from the terrorists, the house was burned down and the apartments ransacked, and the family was just missing. Shortly thereafter, the ‘find my phone’ app located them in Gaza. It took longer for people to realize that the entire family was gone, not only because Nir Oz was a war zone, because also they had no immediate family in the country. Their friends, concerned for their safety, stepped up. Within two weeks, Vitaly Trufanov’s body was discovered near the Gaza border; of the others, there was no sign.
Sasha’s girlfriend, mother, and Safta were all returned by Hamas, but Sasha remains. He has been pictured in a number of PIJ videos, with the last one showing him in desperate condition. In order to draw attention to Sasha’s plight, the returned family started a campaign: #coffee4sasha. Sasha was apparently a coffee fiend, having regular coffee breaks throughout his day at Amazon, with the last being at 3 pm — being honest, if I tried that, I’d never sleep again. Undeterred by insomnia, the family started requesting that people drink a cup of coffee every day at 3 pm in honour of Sasha, while they wait for him to come home.
Perhaps his love of coffee is understandable; did you know that coffee has been being produced and drunk in the Middle East for almost 7 centuries? Although coffee trees were first discovered in Ethiopia, the first people to drink a brew made from its beans were Yemeni Sufis. From Yemen, coffee spread around the Middle East, arriving in the Ottoman Empire some 500 years ago. Turkish coffee got its start, now so popular it is practically its own entire varietal. Turkish coffee is ground and boiled repeatedly, left unfiltered, and poured from a special pot called a cezve, giving it its distinctively strong taste and caffeine content.
But the coffee scene in Israel doesn’t necessarily come from the Turks — indeed, much of its coffee culture comes from the second Aliyah, with the influx of Central European Jews who brought their Viennese cafe culture with them. Along with Bauhaus architecture, the German and Austrian Jews brought a cafe and coffee obsession to Mandatory Palestine. These Jews recreated the European cafes of their erstwhile homes, making space for intellectuals and conversationalists, books and politics. Cafe Landwer is one such cafe, brought from Berlin. But this European cafe revival wasn’t to last too long — when first the Second World War and then the Independence war broke out, coffee was one of the first things to ‘go’ in the period of austerity that characterized the first decades of the state. A company in Israel at the time specialized in ersatz coffee production, made from roasted date kernels. As delicious as that sounds, by the 1970s, real coffee started to come back to the country, and made rapid inroads. Now, if you want a hint of the pre-war scene, you could go to Tmol Shilshom in Jerusalem, a cafe created in a 200-year-old building, one devoted to books and cafe culture.
If you travel to Israel now, you can find coffee everywhere — from Aroma cafes to the espresso that’s sold at every gas station — although the rich black coffee formerly known as “Turkish coffee” got a freedom-fries style rebrand of late, due to declining relationships between Israel and Turkey. If you travel to Israel, ask for Israeli or Black coffee instead. And you find very few Starbucks locations, something many Israelis are very proud of. I spent a summer living in Israel and I got hooked on Nes Cafe, or, instant coffee stirred into very hot steamed milk. There was an English Cake bakery near my apartment and one morning, I went there and ordered an “iced cafe.” They heard “nes cafe” and I was too Canadian and they were too Israeli for the order to be amended once they handed me the hot coffee I definitively had not ordered. Being the Canadian I am, I took it meekly and drank it once they started rolling their eyes at my apparent inability to order properly in Hebrew — and, what do you know, it was a happy accident. Now, my favourite thing to do upon arriving in Israel is to wake up early and walk to the shuk, and wander the market as it opens with an iced coffee or nes cafe in hand.
Like many other hostage families and friends, #coffee4sasha was a way of trying to get others to care about those who had been taken captive. Something I can’t stop thinking about is the unique conundrum the families of returned hostages are in right now: in order to get the public to campaign for their loved one’s release, they had to turn that person into a public figure. They had to tell the public who their person was, from their love of yoga to their bad 3 pm coffee habit. We came to learn about these hostages, their likes and dislikes, their hopes and dreams, their histories and their aspirations for the future. But the problem is, once that hostage is (blessedly) returned, the same public remains intensely interested in their fate. Families who then, naturally, want privacy to help them recover, to help themselves recover, from the ordeal in Gaza, have a whole world of people who are desperate to know how they are. They want to hear about what they went through in Gaza, they want to know what horrors they survived, they want to hear how they are doing now, how they feel to be home, what the first thing that they asked to eat was. We are not entitled to those details. We can just be relieved from afar, that the boy we once drank coffee in honour of once a day, can safely drink it at home with his girlfriend and mother once again.
May tomorrow’s coffee be the last we have to drink in honour of Sasha Trufanov. And may the other two men be returned to their families and loved ones. May, by next Valentines, we have no families anymore whose hearts are still in Gaza.
Betayavon and Shabbat Shalom.